i think that the misconception a lot of people have is this idea that windsor is "just outside toronto".

windsor is in the greater detroit area, which is a 5-6 hour drive to toronto.

it's closer to cleveland, and maybe even closer to chicago.

it's a suburb of detroit; it's not in any obscure way a part of toronto.

this is a bubble, and it's set to burst, but i now only have two months to wait it out. ugh.

watch it burst the day after i sign.

i suspect good things will happen in the first week of september, it's just scary to imagine waiting that long.

i'm not sure the math adds up, anyways.

let's say you rent to a student 10 months a year and jack the price up in between. if you start at 700, and jack it up $50 a year, then after three years, you'd get

700*10 = 7000.
750*10 = 7500.
800*10 = 8000.
===============
22500

now let's say you rent to me at 700 for the whole year, and can increase by inflation:

700*12 = 8400
700*1.015*12 = 8526
700*(1.015)^2*12 = 8654
================
25580

so, you'd actually make $3000 more over those years.

10*3(700 + x) > 25500 ====> x > 150.

& that's an unreasonable expectation.

but, i'll wait until the end of august to make the case.

i was thinking august 1st would be a good moving date because it would help me get in before the influx of students, over the summer - and i was fully aware from the start that i'd be competing with students for spots. that's why i picked this date....i didn't want to deal with the problems around september 1st...

what i'm learning is that there's a lot of people that have set up basement apartments, explicitly hoping for students. a lot of them are overcharging.

what i'm learning is that there's as lot of furnished rooms available in badly cut-up housing, and these people are explicitly looking for students, as well. these people are overcharging.

& what i'm also learning is that even people with normal apartments are prioritizing students over non-students. & these people are overcharging, too.

it's easy to understand why, after a moment's thought: renting to students means they're going to move out in ten months, and you can jack the rent up for next year. or, at least, that's what people are thinking..

yet, it's abundantly clear to me that these people are getting greedy, and the fact that they're overcharging in the presence of an oversupply of student housing is just going to leave them with empty units.

i want to avoid the professionals...these people are scum bags...

but, given that the whole city wants to rent to students, to the point they don't call non-students back, it seems like october might be the better choice than august.

that's what i'm learning.

i guess we'll see.

but, i'm going to wait until the end of august before i started pitching to mom in the suburbs about renting that basement suit unfurnished.

and, what alt-right neo-nazi theorist am i getting these crazy ideas from?

karl marx.

and, are canadian workers next?

you betcha!

workers in europe should get ready for class war like they've never seen it before.

that was the real point of this...

hey, don't like your job? that's fine - that nice muslim refugee over there with a grade three education is eager to work for half your wages.

you don't think this is all a coincidence, do you?

for me, what it means is that i might be looking at a lot of units that are opening up for what is essentially the same reason as this one, and that i need to be extra cautious about the potential of just moving in parallel.

it seems like renting to a pothead creates a deadzone in the units around it that can only be sustainably filled by other potheads.

so, what i would suspect you'll see begin to happen is that these units will begin to form blocks, and expand to take over entire buildings.

the conclusion is undeniably that a single pothead can irreversibly ruin an entire building very quickly.

but, a pattern may be developing: all the empty rental units in what is currently a tight market are in close proximity to marijuana users, it seems.

it makes it seem like everybody smokes pot.

but, we know that's not true...

when this unit opens up, it will fit that pattern.

maybe, the truth is that nobody wants to live near dirty potheads.

is this quitting smoking thing worth it?

i dunno.

but, i'm hardly going to go back to it, now.

yeah. that unit was basically the same thing as this one. slightly smaller bedroom, slightly bigger kitchen, but the same floor space.

same old flooring that doesn't keep anything out...

and, i could smell the pothead below me, walking by the door.

the only substantive difference is that it is $50 more expensive....

i asked the tenant if he could smell the smoke, and at first he said "sometimes", but then backtracked immediately.

listen...

if you're a property manager, or a tenant, and somebody asks you about smoke, please be honest. if you tell me there's no smoke, and there is, i'm going to sue the fuck out of you. it's not sneaky. it's not smart. it's not a save. it's false advertising, and i'll make you pay for it.

non-smokers do not want to live with smokers.

deal with it.

i took an application, but i'm viewing it as a last resort, and expect it to actually begone fairly quickly - if i was a smoker, i'd be all over it. but, then again, if i smoked, i wouldn't need to move in the first place...

i'm really not apprehensive about calling myself middle-aged at all.

i've been keenly aware for my whole life that i have noting in common with my own age group. and, i think i've demonstrated clearly enough that putting me in close proximity with young people is just going to lead to conflict.

i'd love to move to a seniors home, if they'd have me.

again: i am not a young person looking for a wild atmosphere.

i am a middle-aged transwoman looking for a clean, safe & healthy environment.

july's done.

i'll wait until tonight before i get a start on august.

i've got a few showings in the next few days, but i'm not really excited about any of them. i expect the building i'm going to see this afternoon to be full of drugs, for example. but at least i'll be able to cross it off...

i've been completely straight edge (except coffee.) since memorial day, fwiw - which is not particularly unusual for me, even if it's not reflective of recent habits. i have a history of staying sober for months at a time. so, have i officially grown out of intoxicants? i guess we'll see. probably not. but, i plan on staying completely smoke & alcohol free until i move, at least.

that should make it easier to identify smoky apartments, i hope.

i'm going to be extremely picky. i have to be. i don't want to do this again. but, if i end up in the same situation, i will do it again, too.

see, this is political, and everybody looks stupid.

what i want to see is shovels in the ground for affordable housing.

and i don't care what level of government writes the checks.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-tories-accuse-trudeau-of-stoking-fear-to-silence-critics-questioning/

july is winding down.

should i be concerned? yes.

should i panic? no.

i really wish i could get into that unit around the corner....i'm almost contemplating putting a deposit down without seeing it...

whether i'm able to find a small office in a safe building or not, i think that my ideas around what is feasible with this should expose my thought process on the matter - i am not looking for a fancy apartment or a bourgeois neighbourhood or even a dedicated bathroom, so much as i am seeking a place to store my gear. that is the #1 priority, and will remain so until i can finish the discography.

the problem with this scheme is that the availability of small office space in this town appears to be low.

office space is cheap and plentiful, but you have to buy it by the thousands of square feet. i'd be looking for less than 500. that simply doesn't seem to exist.

i found one add that is exactly what i want, but it's a little old. i'll see if i can follow up tomorrow....

so, it's less that i'd be renting an office to live in - i'd be renting an office to work in. i'd just be working very long hours, and crashing in hotels every now and again....

the reason this is reasonable to me is that i have every desire to spend essentially all of my time working, anyways. i want 130 hour work weeks, and 40 hour days. it's what i do. what's pissing me off is that i've been so unproductive...

if you put me in a room with my stuff, like this, i'm not going to want to leave very often, and i'm not going to want to sleep very often, either.

i'm honestly only going to want to sleep once a week, and i'm honestly only going to want to shower once a week. so, why pay for this stuff full time?

but, see, renting a room is a shitty deal when you want to fill it up with gear - you can't find a 300+ square foot room, and, if you somehow could, you don't want to leave that gear in a house with other tenants that you know almost nothing about.

and, while i guess i don't need a private bathroom all of the time, i'd like it to be private when i do use it.

this would obviously not be feasible if i had to get up to go to work every day, or i otherwise had some kind of serious schedule. but, the weirdness of my life, and the singularity of my focus, makes it something i want to think seriously about.

the downside of this is storage & convenience. i'll take an acceptable apartment if i can find one. but, if i can't...

...i'm going to need to get creative. and, with a little luck on the market, i think this can work.

i just remain skeptical that the worker will approve this.

there is really only one place on the market that i'm taking seriously right now, and it's through that screwy management company, and the tenants won't let me in.

new crazy plan.

i can probably get a nice 300-500 square foot office space in a secure building for under $500. the catch is it won't have a bedroom or a kitchen, it'll just be an office space.

but, i can get a mini-fridge. and, i can get a heating pad. and i have a microwave, too. in fact, i could conceivably share a kitchen - this bothers me much less than sharing a bathroom.

and, i could sleep on the couch in the studio/office.

everything is solved, except the bathroom. what to do about that?

well, i actually don't shower every day, and there's no use in pretending that i do. i shower five or six times a month - either when i'm going out somewhere, or when i really need it. and, if i'm spending 95% of my time in an air-conditioned studio, i'm not going to need to shower often.

let's say i can get an office for exactly $489/month, all inclusive. i'm budgeting $700-800 for living expenses. that means i'd have $200-300/month to spend on hotel rooms (in fact, probably air bnbs...), when necessary.

so, let's say i want to hit a concert in detroit @ 8:00 pm. i could check in somewhere at 2:00, do a small amount of laundry, clean myself up and be out the door by 18:00. i could then be back in the hotel by 9:00 am at the latest, take a shower and make it back to the office to crash - or crash in the room if i'm back earlier, whatever. the going price for this seems to be about $40-50.

if i average a shower once a week, whether i need it or not, that's <$200/month.

so, that's <$700 on living expenses - and i'm very much in the clear.

crazy?

i dunno.

it's probably both the safest possible place for my gear, and the nicest possible place to get some sleep, at the same time. and, in the process i may be turning this gig economy thing on it's head.

my disability worker says there's no problem with this. hrmmn. i dunno....

we have tremendous clean energy resources in this province.

the idea of people converting off the grid to natural gas in 2018 is retarded.

that should not happen. and, the government's policy should be to make sure it doesn't happen...

my opinion on the topic - and i've been clear about this for many years - is that government policy should be to ensure that clean hydro is a less expensive alternative than dirty fossil fuels.

electrical base board heating should be less expensive than gas heating, and it's up to the government to interfere with the market until this is true.

mark my words: if you recently spent thousands of dollars on a gas furnace to avoid electrical heating costs, it will not be much more than a couple of years before the price of gas has increased so that the cost of gas heating is comparable to the cost of electrical heating.

and, the gas companies will just eat the difference as profit.

because that's capitalism.

suckers....

if you find your heating costs are high, you are better off investing in insulation than you are in changing the fuel that you use.

new windows are a better idea than a new furnace.

what economics 101 will actually teach you is that, once the market settles, the owner of the natural gas company and the owner of the electricity company will then get together and collude with each other to keep the prices high.

it is not in their rational self-interest to compete. rather, it is in their rational self-interest to cartelize, and then set prices in co-ordination with each other.

so, if the electricity company wants to increase rates, it will call the gas company, which will also increase it's rates.

economics 101, guys.

and, you can try to get the government to stop them from doing that with regulatory bodies, but those bodies just end up in the cartel, in the end.

the only real solution is public ownership....

if you run a natural gas company, you're not going to look at the situation and say "gee, my product costs less than my competitor. hooray!".

rather, you're going to look at the situation and say "my competitor charges a higher price than i do, so i have the ability to increase my prices, until they are roughly comparable to my competitor. that is an opportunity for profit that i must take advantage of."

it's economics 101.

if you have a situation where two replaceable commodities are competing with each other on a market where demand is inelastic (like heating homes.), the cheaper one always rises to meet the cost of the more expensive one, in the long run. the reason is that producers make pricing decisions under inelastic demand, not consumers. consumers cannot do without heat to bring the price down. so, the cheaper producer may undercut the market in the short term, but will have infinite leverage in increasing prices, until it catches up to the more expensive one. and, because producers exist to maximize profit, they will do so.

in the end, buying natural gas is not cheaper than buying electricity - but it may be more profitable to sell it.

it is consequently not rational to convert to the cheaper production option, unless you can find some way to recoup the costs, quickly. and, if you're going to switch, you should ensure you can switch back at minimal effort.

what that means is that what these people should have done is keep the electrical baseboards in place, and let the tenants decide what to use based on what is cheaper at the time. and, if such an arrangement were to become widespread, the (relative) elasticity of the demand would increase, and market forces may have some effect on price.

something that's coming up over and over again is that units that i would be able to afford if they were heated by electricity are now out of my price range because they're heated by gas.

you have to pay $40/month here for gas as a base rate. if you have the gas off for eight or nine months, that's $250+ wasted on user fees. for somebody like myself that has very low electrical use, i'm going to make that up on baseboard heating.

i saw them do it in my old apartment, and looked into the costs - it's expensive. it takes 25 years to make the money back. so, the owners are understandably increasing rental costs to adjust - they don't want to take 25 years to make up the costs of renovations. but, what tenant wants a renovation that increases their monthly bills?

the end result is that what were once affordable units are now no longer affordable to the people they were once affordable to. so, we're seeing units sit for longer periods. but, it doesn't make sense for the owners to bring the price down - they have to wait.

the gas furnaces are also just ugly. they take nice units and run ducts through therm in awkward places. that itself is going to decrease the desirability of the unit. who wants to live in a warehouse?

i tried to warn the last guy that putting in that gas furnace was going to kill his property value, and i tried to warn him that the way markets work is that if the cost of natural gas is lower today then it is inevitably going to rise, tomorrow, to balance out. natural gas producers don't want to offer a more affordable option; if it's cheaper than electricity today, they're undercutting the market, and will eventually want their prices to be the same as that for electricity. and, while some of my arguments got through, his brother just wanted a furnace. i learned in the end that his son-in-law worked for the gas company...

most people don't have relatives in the industry. and, if it's not already obvious to them now, they're going to wake up soon and realize that converting to gas was a terrible mistake.

note to the universe: i cannot afford to pay for gas heating. that's an instant disqualifier. so, stop throwing these ads at me...

DONALD, LISTEN TO ME, YOU HAVE TO UNDERSTAND THAT THE WALRUS WAS PAUL ALL ALONG, THE WHOLE FUCKING TIME, MAN. NO KIDDING. FOR REAL. THIS WALRUS BEFORE YOU IS AN IMPOSTER. IS IT EVEN A REAL MOUSTACHE? HAVE YOU EVER TRIED TO PULL IT OFF? MAYBE YOU CAN TRY AND PULL OFF EACH OTHER'S FAKE HAIR FOR A JOKE AND POST IT ON SNAPCHAT. BUT THE WALRUS IS PAUL, DONALD. THE WALRUS IS PAUL.

mr. rouhani,

i bet the russians would love a nice deep water port on the indian ocean.

mmmmm?

the era of american regime change on demand is over in the middle east.

kookookachew.

the russians have demonstrated that they are both willing to facilitate and in truth actually invested in a change of government in tehran.

but, they will protect iran from the use of american force to the extent that they can.

the only serious option on the table is diplomatic.

iran is also increasingly in china's back yard, and they are the real wild card in the equation.

an american attack on iran may be most notable to history for the initiation of chinese forces into the middle east.

is the united states capable of regime change in iran?

well, that depends on a number of factors, most importantly russian involvement.

here's the thing: i don't imagine that putin is particularly ensconced with the iranian form of government, & the iranians themselves are less than excited about allowing the russians to move in, as they don't tend to go home, either. but, if the iranians & russians can make a defense deal - which they have in fact already done - then that forces america to react on the ground, because those russian air defenses.....what they do is force the americans to use stealth bombers, which they are almost certainly unwilling to do.

and, this is the part of the situation that few americans, or canadians, or members of the nato-alliance in general are truly cognizant of: whatever you think of trump's words, the reality is that his threats are hollow.

the only real strategic option that the americans have against the iranians is nuclear, and you're insane to put that option on the table.

so, is the audience domestic, then?

clearly.

there's not much to the story, itself, i don't think.

again: my imagination is that trudeau physically escorted a reporter away from him at a festival, which is only a groping accusation under malice. that's just an intuitive reading. nobody has facts. and, i think that's why nobody is saying anything about it: if you want to take him down, you want to let people assume the worst.

but, facts and perception are different things.

and, this may just be the start....

the story was initially pushed by warren kinsella, who is a wild card, and is now being pushed by penny collenette, who is not.

when kinsella & collennette are both out to get you, you've got some problems with the big wigs in the liberal party of canada. and, that's bad news for justin trudeau.

the good news for justin trudeau is that if this is the best they've got...

...but, the good news for the country is that this is some evidence that the left side of the liberal party is beginning to revolt against trudeau, who campaigned on a return to historical canadianism and traditional liberal party values but has instead governed like an american democrat - which is on the very far right of the canadian political spectrum, often times appearing indistinguishable from the conservative party, and at times even worse.

i suspect that the issue that's getting in their craw is nafta. trudeau seems to be fully pro-nafta. the liberal party higher-ups were always deeply skeptical of nafta, always felt forced to co-operate against their will by mulroney, always wanted a bilateral agreement with the states, and i suspect they don't like how he's handling this. trudeau also appears to have a kind of anti-russian streak that the party has historically seen as anathema. there is simply no pro-war wing in the liberal party of canada.

i've been calling for the party to push back for a while. while i don't suspect they're actually listening, there may be a confluence of opinon developing.

you can like justin trudeau if you want, but you have to understand that he's in the wrong party, in canada - he's a conservative, in canada. go blow your mind out in the car, but it's true. & this might be the first rumblings that the party may have had enough of it...

https://www.hilltimes.com/2018/07/23/pm-trudeau-failed-offer-satisfactory-response-groping-allegation-owes-full-explanation-caucus-retreat-saskatoon/151716

yeah.

so, i think what i'm learning here is that evicting the tenant below me would not have been sufficient to solve the problem.

i do think she's gone. and it is way better. no question, but, it's not good enough.

and, that's kind of what i reasoned. well, what i decided was that she'd likely be replaced by something as bad, or worse. i mean, at least she works. what if she was down there all day? egads.

i may be stuck here another month, but i'm confident i made the right choice in getting out.

if you show up in a building and hold a meeting about hating gays and jews, and then distribute literature about it and march around outside, you're participating in a hate group and distributing hate propaganda and propagating hate speech.

....unless you put a cross or a crescent on the door?

that's bullshit.

these organizations need to be held accountable to the same standards we hold secular groups to.

so, that gets me through june....

july may be a little slower, but nothing's coming up in the listings, so i'd might as well be industrious.

can i get this done before the sun comes up?

can i stay awake that long?

i'm due for a long day...

good.

if the prime minister of the country cannot afford to pay his childcare staff a living wage, we should remove ourselves from the oecd.

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/government-sets-full-time-salary-range-for-justin-trudeaus-nanny

i'm just about done june, at least; this was a very productive weekend, whether i'm able to stay awake much longer, or not.

yeah, i'm now getting a heavy cbd stench, and am feeling a little woozy.

my guess is that the sage was to cover the smell.

but, i need to be clear: i can't tell if they're burning sage, if they're smoking cloves, if they're performing a mass or if they're barbequing chicken.

it's not something my nose can figure out on it's own...

what i can point out is that my throat feels a little raw, and i've sneezed a few times.

it does not appear to be getting me stoned, at this time.

like, if somebody's trying to do an exorcism or something downstairs, all i gotta say is that you're just unnecessarily exposing me to carcinogens.

it's back to that sage smell that was dominant when i first moved in...

i don't know if somebody is literally burning sage, or if there's a religious christian around or what, but my viewpoint is that smoke is smoke is smoke: tobacco = sage = pot. i don't have any patience for a religious argument...

it's nowhere near as bad, but it's still second-hand smoke and it's still gross.

the actual truth about the nsa spying story is that it wasn't actually news - we'd known all of this for years.

the EU got very upset about this, in the 90s.

if anything, what came out around snowden, etc made it seem like the practice is more restricted than it actually is.

i did not hear echelon mentioned once in the whole fiasco.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON

this is what you call a "teachable moment".

instead of ignorantly kneejerking against me, everybody should take this as an opportunity to learn something about what their obligations are under the law, and ensure they're not negligent in their actions, moving forwards.

to be clear: i intend to pay my rent on august 1st. i took my deposit back out of necessity, realizing that the market was very short term in june; i missed out on a few spots, because i wasn't sure i could finance. then, once i had the deposit ready, the market dried up completely in july. i can only hope it gets better in august...

but, i said from the start that it wasn't notice, and i intended to pay rent going forward if i couldn't find something.

...unless the court order comes in before then, and tells me i can withhold it until the payout comes in. then, i'll be allowed to withhold it.

i just have to keep cycling around to the point: i'm claiming negligence. if the court agrees with me, why should i suffer consequences for standing up for my rights?

and, if you don't believe in rights, you're negligent, too.

still raining.

market still sucks.

no response from the adjudicator.

hopefully, i can get through most of june by midnight. and, hopefully, the rest of the week is as productive, if i'm stuck here for another month - as it is increasingly appearing as though i am.

i was going to bike down to catch that open house in the act, but it's raining out.

we'll see if it clears up before 4:00.

ugh.

...& that was a quick movement through may.

as the air has legitimately cleared out, i've been able to stay awake a little longer over the last few days - although i say that as something is wafting in, i think from a different unit, perhaps a few floors down.

i've picked up a nasty smokers' cough, though, i'm not exaggerating. it's that tightening in your chest, and that constant inability to be able to cough out the obstruction. i thought i'd gotten rid of that...alas...

market still sucks.

on to june...

everything you're seeing is theatre, written by the cia, itself - and some actors are more cognizant of it than others.

the basic idea to understand, first and foremost, is that the deep state sees hillary clinton as an existential threat. & you can find a mountain of evidence about this, if you look for it.

so, all of this is really about clinton, and not about trump.

but, this is how it works:

1) the deep state rigs the election - in favour of trump. so, it was the cia itself feeding documents to wikileaks.
2) the deep state then blames it on the russians, as a distraction & bait and switch.
3) the deep state uses the fabrication it's constructed around the situation to take down trump and put their own guy in.

if we accept that it is obvious that the russians have plants in america, the question becomes identifying who they are.

&, if you ask me, ron paul & alex jones are the prime suspects.

the russians have plants everywhere - nobody seem to be surprised by this.

but, there's a pattern in their plants, if you look for it: they go after what you might call "right-libertarians", that promote a false sense of nationalism, rooted in a skewed concept of white identity.

so, in france the russians fund the national front - and quite heavily. and, there is a very powerful policy goal in supporting the national front, as a french abandonment of nato would neutralize a major threat coming in off the steppe. the russians are pragmatic about the racism - this is a holdover from soviet times, albeit with the revolutionary goals replaced with cynicism. they're essentially using the socialist theories against us; the idea is that they think they can use the racial animus run rampant from low education and industrial decay as a vehicle to put their people in power.

you might think that sounds like trump, and trump uses the same methods with the same aims no doubt, but the russian influence network didn't appear in 2016. the kremlin-preferred candidate for years was ron paul, who has always represented this intersection point of right-libertarianism and white nationalism that the russians have a habit of propping up. and, the propaganda arm they used was always alex jones.

i'm not going to be filling in posts here from 2008-2013 for a very, very long time. but i wrote quite extensively about this around climategate.

i'm extrapolating a little with rand paul. i accept. but i am comfortable stating with a confident amount of force that ron paul and alex jones are both russian spies.

and, when the rest of the 2016 stuff comes up, you'll see me unveil a theory that trump is a creature of the pentagon, who are projecting the russian connections as a mirage. i haven't been keeping up because i think it's a lot of nonsense, but i saw this coming from before the election.

actually, i think rand paul actually is a russian agent.

i've been saying that for years and years - years before trump.

you wouldn't get a joke about random variables.

sigma chi, huh?

"did you add the latte to the bill?"

i could tutor for spare money.

maybe.

if you promise not to hit on me.

& not be an upper class twit....

listen.

i was right.

right?

fuck...

if she's not gone, she's in the process of moving.

fuck.

i'm sure i could win the eviction case in september, but the lease is already done on october 1st.

this doesn't have to be pyrrhic...i'm just dreading the conversation on july 31st if i don't sign a lease in the next ten days...

"is she gone?"
"yes."
"well..."
"you successfully sued us for $5000."
"well, that means i was right. and, she's gone, now..."
"fuck off."

so, the tenant decided nobody was going in today.

i had hopes on that one. alas...

what do i need, really?

i don't really need a "living room", exactly. what i need are:

1) a bedroom
2) a studio
3) an eat-in kitchen

& i could potentially merge the studio & kitchen into a "living room".

so, for example, i could have really done without the living room in the last apartment. i could have put the couch in the kitchen - it was big enough.

what that means is that i could utilize a small one-bedroom with a big kitchen, by turning the "living room" into a bedroom, the "bedroom" into a studio and putting the couch in the kitchen - it just has to have a big enough kitchen for that to make sense.

hrmmn.

i've set some appointments for next week, that i wanted to wait to schedule until after the outcome of the showing this morning. just have to keep looking...

i have until oct 1, remember.

if you know a little bit about the process, you know that they try to avoid transferring children directly from birth parents to foster care. everybody understands that this is traumatic. so, you don't want the kids to associate the separation process with the people taking care of them - whether permanently or not.

instead, they get these neutral figures - cops, or people the kids will otherwise not see again - to do the actual separation. they then place them somewhere for a short amount of time, before the foster parents are assigned, and come in and take them out.

the process looks brutal, and it is, but where exactly did you get your degree from, that allows you to second guess all the preparation that was put into this, for the benefit of the child?

how many kids are now sitting in jail with their parents as a consequence of the administration ignoring the court ruling to separate them?

which, was what the administration wanted in the first place....

if you're telling me that the choice is between putting kids in jail and putting them in foster homes, and you're upset about hearing them cry when they're being taken out of jail and placed into care, so they should therefore by left in jail, then you're a fucking idiot.

it's not a left/right distinction. it's a smart/dumb distinction.

and, i'll acknowledge that you might be ignorant about the options, but, in that case, you should educate yourself before you speak.

yeah.

if you want to be maximalist, we can include hail to the thief, and then criticize it as a weak attempt to regain their glory years, but then jump immediately to the fall of math.

you'd then need to follow 65dos through the 00s up to we were exploding anyway..

and, then, i suppose you'd jump to son lux.

i would argue that 65daysofstatic kind of picked up where radiohead left off about '01 or '02, and you should direct kids towards that band, instead.

you can tell what generation a person places themselves in by analyzing their reaction to radiohead, who sort of form a generational bridge.

there's younger people that have barely even heard their classic work - we call these millennials. unambiguously.

and, there are plenty of older people that started off listening to their 90s works and then kept listening as they changed their style. these people are on some kind of cusp, but have decided to move with millennials for social advancement or whatever other reason.

then, there are people like me that grew up on their classic material, and tried to give kid a a chance, but ultimately rejected it. i like amnesiac better; always have. kid a is a mediocre record. C/C-. we're gen x, and not interested in what millennials think. at all.

no, i mean, honestly?

who cares about radiohead in 2018?

i would be interested in radiohead doing a 90s tour in a small venue, but i'm not interested in watching them perform their recent material in a hockey arena.

given the very low quality of radiohead's recorded output over the last 15 years, it's hard to believe they still command such a large audience.

they haven't done anything worth mentioning since amnesiac.

sorry.

i mean, maybe you should be reading "hush money" as "payment for services rendered".

i really don't think that there's a lot of people left in america in 2018 that are going to get particularly upset about the president having consensual sex out of wedlock.

but, he has a lot to gain in a young male voting demographic by projecting the image that he's regularly fucking porn stars on the side.

i mean, at this point, you need to make a choice: either this is all bullshit to boost his public image, or there's enough evidence to lay prostitution charges.

i'm actually of the opinion that these porn star stories are fabrications to try and make trump look like a badass - that he thinks banging porn stars will actually win him votes.

it trudeau reacts by exacerbating the situation, and signs a bilateral deal with mexico that is good for shareholders at the expense of workers, we will understand where his head was the whole time.

if he takes a step back, and insists on getting tougher with mexico, we'll know he was just misguided and clueless and frankly straight up ignorant.

kinda can't win.

shouldda offered to dissolve from the start....

your job goes to mexico.

the company pays lower wages, and consequently gets higher profits.

that comes out in terms of dividends, which go to shareholders - like a young justin trudeau in the 90s.

and, like his own kids over the upcoming years.

so, when a justin trudeau stands up for a nafta, it is easy to understand why - the wealth trickled up, and he's exactly who it tricked up to.

there is absolutely no question at all that ordinary canadians will be way better off with a bilateral deal with the united states than they will be with a three way trade deal that includes mexico. but, it is not clear to me if trudeau doesn't understand this or is in fact behaving in the interests of the investor class - that 1% - that benefits from the existing arrangement. he is, himself a trust fund kid.

if you lost a job because of nafta, trudeau was in the class of people that made money from it.

we will have an answer to that question when we see whether he seeks to redefine the trade relationship with mexico or not. i would hope that he will realize that a nafta without the united states would be a foolish thing for canada to carry through with.

....as a tpp without the united states is also a foolish thing for canada to carry through with.

but, we'll see the answer to this, shortly.

i never thought i'd see a day when the republican president of the united states had a better plan for canada than the liberal prime minister does, but here we are.

so, that's april.

as expected, it was a little shorter, and i expect that to hold for the rest of 2014.

the market is not opening up like i hoped, but i do have some showings on the weekend.

back to looking for the day...

it's not like the stock market follows some law of gravity or something.

but, the policy right now is money destruction. and, that means divestment, and deflation.

if you want the dow at 30,000, it's not an impossibility, but you need to print the money that takes us up to 30,000 tokens worth of credit, first.

and, if you insist on destroying money, instead, you're going to deflate the bubble.

to be clear: there's no reason you can't inflate the dow to 40,000, 50,000 - 100,000. but, it's a question of how much money you want to print, to do it.

what you can't do is create paper wealth and destroy it at the same time.

i actually think that you'd get a very strong response if you set up a program to rebuild syria and asked the refugees to volunteer.

i think they'd jump at it.

and, i think they'd thank us for it.

i want to be clear, i'm not saying that we should just round the refugees up and fly them back and yell "see ya later" as we drop them out in parachutes.

we should train them in construction & send them back with bags of concrete, beams of steel and hard hats galore.

we should teach them how to demine, and let them loose.

give them shovels & cranes & other tools to pull back the rubble with.

i just think we need to redefine solidarity. we can't absorb the whole world,. and, even if we take in hundreds of thousands of them, it doesn't rebuild the country, which remains a pile of rubble. so, i want solidarity to mean helping rebuild destroyed cities, helping to fight gangs, dismantling systems of oppression...

the old saying is to teach a man to fish. i think that generalizes to teaching people to fight, and teaching people to rebuild.

this isn't outside of our history, either. remember the marshall plan? well, understand that it wasn't charity - unless you understand it as corporate welfare. building things means awarding contracts....

trudeau should just make the carbon tax federal.

if republicans passed a law in congress declaring america a christian state, would that make it true?

would it withstand a court challenge?

i understand the underlying debate about jewishness v. democracy, and i understand that israel is going through a phase of racist nationalism. but, i have a hard time believing that this kind of anti-palestinian racism is easily abstracted to explicit support for jewishness, and everything that means.

israel is not a jewish state, but a modern secular society with some severe racial identity problems.

and, i suspect that this may backfire badly.

i don't see how a declaration of this sort would have any meaningful legal ramifications, either.

supreme court judges are not supposed to arbitrarily overturn precedent. they're supposed to actually have a good reason - a miscarriage of justice.

so, it's going to be harder to reverse roe v. wade than you think.

they're either going to have to come up with an argument as to why the ruling was wrong, which is going to be hard given that it clearly wasn't, or they're going to have to come up with something that somehow lets the state overturn a right to choose - some kind of trump card over personal autonomy. it's hard to imagine what that is.

in theory, it would be easier to legislate an end to it, and then let the court uphold the new legislation. but, if such a thing were plausible, it would be done by now.

how much money would the republicans lose in fundraising if they could actually pull this off? how many votes would drift elsewhere? it's kind of at the centre of their party.

i don't want to say you shouldn't remain vigilant, because you should. i just hardly think you should get apocalyptic about it...

we should send the refugees back to rebuild.

who else is going to do it?

and, why don't they want to?

the french and polish didn't stay in britain. they wanted to go home.

https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/8xbqx3/raqqa-residents-blame-the-us-for-neglecting-the-citys-recovery

and, why does it take the fucking atheist to tell you to respect your goddamned elders?

again: russophobia is a very old term, at least as old as the victorian era, but apparently tied to the western european fear of being overrun by mongolian hordes, as a consequence of the very real mongolian invasions of the middle ages.

i first encountered the term in the 90s, when i was reading up on the great game.

and, the term "islamophobia" may very well be actually etymologically derived from it.

it seems like some people don't know who stephen cohen is.

stephen cohen is the country's leading russian-american scholar.

country's.

leading.

scholar.

and, the fact is that if you've never heard of stephen cohen, you have no business saying anything about russia at all.

(& tucker carlson is a jerk.)

you can tell me that that could have happened anywhere, and you're right, but it hasn't.

if the ndp are going to start accusing people of racism, they need to make sure their arguments are grounded, otherwise it's going to backfire. it's one thing to accuse somebody of racism when they're being racist - that will resonate. it's another to accuse somebody of being racist when they're not being racist - that will backfire. we've all been in a room with the airhead activist that thinks everything is racist - that's an experience we can all draw on, and instantly identify with. horwath wants to strenuously avoid being typecast that way.

the empirical fact is that the jane & finch area is dangerous, and that it is reasonable to take precautions before entering it. we can have a discussion about root causes and whatnot, but it's just daft to live in denial of the reality of it - or to accuse the facts of being racist.

i've only been near there once, and i was assumed to be a prostitute and nearly assaulted while hitch-hiking up wilson, near jane. the reality is that i didn't know where i was. i didn't see any signs indicating i was on jane street, and i was off it before i realized it. but, had i known where i was, i would have immediately gotten away from the area - because i would have realized that it's not a safe place for a lightish-skinned trans girl to walk around by herself.

which is what i learned, quite quickly.

as mentioned repeatedly, i don't think of marijuana as something i want to do to relax by myself; that actually strikes me as kind of absurd, as smoking pot by yourself all the time is going to make you paranoid and anti-social.

it's something that should be done infrequently, and with people.

and it doesn't reduce anxiety or cure cancer.

the only clinical evidence that exists on the topic actually suggests that marijuana makes anxiety worse.

sorry.

it's absolute, utter bullshit....

sometimes, if you want to be at the right meetings to get the right information to further your research, you need to compromise a little.

and, that's what happens when you open up research dollars to private funding - the most powerful lobbyists stand in between academics and their research, and are able to extract concessions in exchange for access.

it's fundamentally incompatible with a free society. but, if america was anything approaching a free society in the past, it hasn't been in a long time.

if you listen to what joe is saying, you might be tempted to believe that there's some kind of vast right wing conspiracy or something...

glenn makes a good point, but i'm not sure if he realized the depth of it. despite record arms deals, the saudis just got their asses handed to them by the russians in syria - and saudi money talks through talking heads in washington.

i think that if you want to understand the surreal and bizarre positions that democrats are taking right now, saudi money coming through think tanks and foundations, like clinton's, probably has a lot to do with it.

the fact is that bill blair was the police chief of a major city where more than 50% of the population was born in another country.

it's reasonable to reserve judgement, until he does something.

i'm going to wait to see what bill blair does before i comment on the situation.

the government had to do something. it's taken a first step. let's see what's next.

if anything, i would expect prices to go up, as these companies will need to find a way to pay down their losses, in addition to regular inflation.

despite the rhetoric to the contrary (or perhaps because of it), things like this always go up in price under the conservatives, because they're not as strenuous about regulating arbitrary price hikes. for all their rhetoric abut "free markets", empirical observation clearly demonstrates that the only "freedom" that conservatives really believe in is the freedom of property owners to set prices however they want.

https://business.financialpost.com/commodities/energy/ontarians-may-see-a-7-reduction-in-their-monthly-bills-as-gas-utilities-halt-cap-and-trade-activities?video_autoplay=true

why don't we figure out if pizza is a vegetable (and tomato sauce comes from a fruit, btw) or not, first, before we start worrying if soy is really milk?

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/plant-based-milk-milk-fda-determine/story?id=56640141

so, what will the americans now refer to the mammalian excretion of goats as, let alone humans?

for future reference.

you can call it a soy-based protein drink if you'd like, it's still better.

i'm not being sardonic.

for every town in saskatchewan, there exists a railroad line, however abandoned - for that is either the reason the town exists, or the reason the line does.

and, if you want to attract people to this landlocked flatland, where you can watch your dog run away for three days, which projects the idea that it exists in the last century, if not the one before that, then something like this might help quite a bit.

if i was a conservative, i'd say something about how the greyhound is shutting down because it's not proftable, so why the fuck should the government take over a failing business?

but, i'm not a conservative, so i'm actually looking at the situation as an opportunity to reduce carbon emissions.

if the state is going to take over a transportation network, it has the obligation to do it in as ecologically sustainable a way as is possible.

given that so much of the rural west was settled by the premise of rail expansion, why not think forwards instead of backwards and replace the buses with electric rail?

the court simply needs to determine whether discrimination is taking place, or not.

when an institution says "i'm discriminating on restricted grounds, because of my faith", it isn't offering an excuse or a reason to allow for it's behaviour, it's merely providing an explanation as to why it needs to be prosecuted in some way or another.

i haven't read the trinity western case or have been following it, but it showed up on the sidebar there.

to begin with, i don't see what any of this has to do with accreditation. a school may pass rules i don't like, but that doesn't have anything to do with whether the students that have enrolled in the school have passed the proper academic requirements. if the debate is being had at the level of the question of whether accreditation should be upheld or not, i can't reasonably side with the queer advocates. and, i might point out that anybody that has graduated from this institution and met all academic requirements has quite strong grounds for a lawsuit -  the unclear question is who should be held liable for it. and, i don't think it's the school.

however, i believe that this was not the question before the supreme court. the question before the supreme court was whether the tribunal had upheld the existing precedent. and, i've framed this differently, because i think the issue is often lost in translation from legalese, as this is what a tribunal is supposed to do. the idea underlying the existence of the tribunal is that there are certain cases that come up that essentially follow the same template over and over. our legal system is based on the idea of stare decisis - that is, that new cases should be settled in the same manner as previous ones were. sending these cases to full trials is just reinventing the wheel over and over - they do not require new decisions or actual judges to work them through, but merely knowledgeable adjudicators to apply the existing precedents. and, in fact, the adjudicators cannot create new law - their scope is very narrow, defined through statue to interpret existing jurisprudence. so, the idea is that these cases are already decided, that they don't need to be decided again and that going through the rigmarole is just a waste of everybody's time. this is why when the issue appears in an actual court, the issue before the judge is whether the precedent was correctly applied - that is, interpreted in a correct and reasonable manner. the adjudicator was never supposed to produce a novel ruling in the first place...

so, if the supreme court comes back and says "the ruling is reasonable", that is not delegating responsibility to the tribunal, or removing itself from the process. what that is doing is saying "the tribunal correctly interpreted the precedent that was already set by the court, and there is consequently no need for an actual trial.". it was the court that set the precedent, and the court that consequently produced the ruling. if the court felt that the tribunal was overstepping it's bounds, that is what a ruling of incorrect or unreasonable actually means...

so, that is what the court did in this case: it said that this question was determined in a previous ruling, the tribunal correctly applied a reasonable interpretation of that ruling and there is no value in bringing the case to a full trial. the court should have then assigned costs to the party responsible for wasting everybody's time.

and, how can the system be so cold to "religious freedom" or the observance of "religious rights"? because there's no such thing, really. it's a legal fiction, often perpetuated by people that don't understand the law well. "religious freedom" is a very restricted idea that applies solely to government, it's not something that has any meaning in a conflict between individuals, or between individuals and institutions. in this case, what the university was trying to argue was that it could restrict the rights of others by denying entry on restricted grounds. they then labelled their attempt to restrict the rights of others as an exercise of their own rights. the tribunal had seen this kind of charade before, and applied the proper precedent to shut it down. end of story. its not a balancing, it's just a bad argument - and one we've been through before, at that.

so, if you have a problem with the ruling in the university case, you need to look at the existing precedent; i haven't read the case, so i don't know what that was.

now, there is a valid criticism here, in that it cements the law in place pretty strongly. before the introduction of these tribunals, the court may have overturned an argument and created new precedent. these tribunals make that a lot harder. but, it's not yet clear if that's good or bad. if the way that courts deal with these tribunals is by more rigorously enforcing their own precedents, that is probably a good thing. what i'm getting at is that the courts are now going to need to demonstrate that the existing precedent was unreasonable, before they overturn it. that should help to prevent the arbitrary overturning of precedent. and, it should hopefully feed back into the tribunals, by providing for clearer instructions in terms of more specific legal tests. in the end, you might need a math degree to be an adjudicator, as it's going to require understanding complicated theorems, with dozens of corollaries.

but, i want to go back to the legal question, as i would have rather seen the issue raised on grounds of discrimination - i would have rather seen the accreditation denied on the entrance requirements. it's subtle. but, we have a critical theory for a reason, and it works the other way when you have a liberal judiciary, as we do in canada.

kristy duncan should resign in protest.

(i don't expect her to...)

they just abolished the ministry of science.

fuck.

i might suggest to mom that she's better off selling her mansion in the burbs and downsizing to something more appropriate for her new life as an ex-mom. she may find she's saving money on travel costs, as well. it's unhealthy to cling to the past; it's time to move on.

and, to the lady that wants some muscle to protect her, she might be better off posting an ad in the classifieds, if she feels like that's what she really wants. but, she might want to drop the entitled attitude that suggests her partner is obligated to fork out $50/week. that, itself, might be the reason she's posting an ad like this in the first place.

sneaky.

...or, better yet, convince another girl to pay for the privilege?

when your daughter grows up and leaves the house, can you just buy a new one?

then, there's this ad, which appears to be a "mom looking for daughter" ad.

it's too far from campus.

but, again - it's a real reflection of marketization. it's hard to know if this is an old mom that wished the experience wasn't so short, or a mom-that-never-was looking to skip the messy toddler phase and jump right to college (or fearful of the catastrophe of having a son...), but it's a marketization of parenthood, nonetheless - in a way that inverts the costs.

what is this ad really for? a roommate? or a partner?

if you open the ad up, it explains that she's looking for a bodyguard - and asking them to pay $50/week to be the bodyguard. even if you include rent, that's still only about $75/week paid out in exchange for a premium service.

of course, the sad reality is that this woman is almost certainly going to get raped by the person she's "hiring" for "protection".

but, what i find more interesting is placing something like this in the context of the marketization brought on by neo-liberalism - it is the conversion of what has generally been considered normal relationship duties into a service to be traded over a market.

i'm sorry, but i just honestly don't have a use for a phone.

- i don't have any friends.
- the only family i talk to is my ageing and increasingly out of it grandmother
- i don't have a job

but, more importantly is that i interact with the internet very actively - i don't consume media, i create it. so, i like things like keyboards and mice and big monitors.

a phone just strikes me as a computer with a really small screen and a very difficult data entry procedure. just a lot of headaches.

to an extent, is that kind of the point? to stop people from typing?

listen: i get that it might be, that a push to get people away from their keyboards and back to their idiot boxes might be in the interests of the elite. but, i'm just not going to do it. if they could somehow succeed in reducing the internet into a watching & listening experience, i'd get bored with it and tune out. i'd keep typing and just file it on my hard drive. or, maybe i'd just get back to recording...and reading actual books...

i don't pay for cable because i wouldn't watch it if i had access for free. and, as it is, i don't consume the media being pushed down - i'm not even aware of what most of it even is.

so, when i say that a phone is just an expensive paperweight, i actually mean it.

listen, nobody expects these third world countries to wake up tomorrow and be beacons of sexual freedom and gender & economic equality.

this is going to take a long time, and it's going to have to come from below.

but, the difference between russia and saudi arabia, or china, is that the russians are actually showing some progress. it's slow. and it's not monolithic; they're moving backwards in some areas. but, it's a start - and certainly far more promising than these other states.

and, i mean, it's not like they're screening for lesbians, right?

it's a silly argument.

i have not had sex with a woman (or at least i don't remember it...) in well over ten years, and it's not been due to lack of opportunity.

as mentioned: i would prefer my own space. but, i don't think there's anything subversive in applying and seeing what they say.

the place could very well be run by third-wave feminist post-grads that think the idea of a transwoman in the basement gives them street cred.

you just don't know until you ask.

another way for me to articulate this is that i have no interest at all in forcing myself into a room that i haven't been invited to be in; i don't want to be where i'm not wanted.

that doesn't mean i'm sanctioning those views. it just means it isn't a battle that has any upside in winning.

regarding applying to live in a "girls only" building...

well, i do identify as a girl.

however, i recognize that this is exceedingly complicated.

the fact is that i'd rather live by myself insofar as that is actually possible. but, i see these units open up from time to time that are essentially basement rentals, with access to the kitchen. regarding that kitchen access, i'll point out that i already own a microwave and could afford to get a small fridge in a big enough basement. i could quite easily organize my meals so that i only need very sporadic access to the kitchen. i pretty much require my own bathroom, though.

i wouldn't apply to a boys only space, because i wouldn't classify myself as a boy - that is not the correct place for me to live, if we must live in gender categorized dwellings. but, i have applied to live in girls' spaces before, and could very well do so again.

is it discrimination if they tell me i'm not a girl and therefore can't stay there? sure. but, i'm actually willing to accept this kind of discrimination as allowable. stated tersely, i would accept the right of cis women to erect cis-female-only spaces - to a caveat.

so, if a property owner decides she wants to split her house up into rooms and only rent to cis-femaless, and the cis-females that live there agree to that, i don't think i have any place arguing against it - that would be invasive on my behalf, because we're sharing parts of the residence. but, if a cis-woman owns an apartment building and decides she only wants to rent to cis-woman, i would consider that to be discriminatory, and argue she should be taken to the human rights tribunal - and that whether she's refusing to rent to me as a trans-woman or as a cis-male is secondary to the female-only policy. this idea would apply equally well to race or orientation or whatever else. and, i believe that the existing jurisprudence actually draws the line at pretty much this exact point.

so, while i'll sue the owner of an apartment building for refusing to rent to me because i'm trans, i do not feel the same animus towards somebody running a rooming house for girls - even as i don't feel any apprehension about applying as a trans-female.

subtle enough?

i just have enough empathy - and am perhaps girl enough - to be able to understand the situation from the other side. even as a transwoman, i might not feel comfortable living in a rooming house with a transfemale at a different stage of transition. i'm trying to avoid a property rights argument, because it's missing the point - it's more about freedom of association. what i think is that it should be up to the tenants.

but, the logic collapses as soon as you start talking about separate apartments - then i go back into trans-activism mode.

we're at a historic juncture where us-russian relations could be taking a turn for a major thaw, and the liberal prime minister of canada wants to start a war in ukraine because he thinks he's fucking rocky.

sacre-dieu; incroyable.

and, deeply embarrassing.

...and, unless they run a libertarian candidate in my riding, i think i decided to vote green in 2019 quite some time ago.

i suspect that the greens are better positioned than the ndp to pick up an anti-war vote, at this point.

whatever hawkish pro-war wing exists in the democratic party simply does not have a parallel in canada, where the liberals didn't just oppose iraq & vietnam but actually even opposed the first world war.

liberal voters in canada expect the party to pursue peace with russia and back efforts by the american president to reduce conflict.

he's going to get eaten alive for these words, by his own base of supporters.

because he thinks he's running for office in the united states...

his father was an important voice for denuclearization and global peace, and i'm frankly embarrassed for him that his son turned out to be a fucking idiot...

i am ashamed and astonished to hear this kind of extreme right-wing pro-war, jingoistic rhetoric from a liberal prime minister of canada.

the guy understands the world through a prism of sylvester stallone movies. he's a product of the american military-entertainment complex.

a dunce, basically.

and, the party needs to force him out before he completely obliterates them.

canada does not understand international relations like it's a rocky film or want to go back to the dangerous days of the cold war, and this man does not speak for this country.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-reacts-trump-putin-1.4749814

i am not a pot-smoking hippie that wants to jam with bongos in a van down by the river.

i am not a drunken frat boy metalhead looking to wow girls to get laid.

i'm not even a straight-edge punk looking to start a revolution (although i have stronger sympathies with this).

what i am is a studied jazz guitarist that writes some kind of classical music for consumption over headphones and wants to do so in a quiet, controlled environment.

and, my hair is long because i'm a girl - not because i'm a rock star.

if i wanted to be a dude guitarist, i'd cut my hair and join a punk band. but that's not what i want to be. at all.

in actual fact, i don't write, listen to or even have much respect for the type of music that is associated with heavy drug or alcohol use.

and, again, i've been very clear on this point for a long time: i am a nerd. i listen to nerd rock.

i know pretty much every genesis record inside and out, but i've never owned a metallica record, or even bothered to listen to one all the way through.

your distorted preconceptions are a consequence of your own refusal to listen, not of any inaccurate projection on my behalf. i was crystal clear. i really was.

i actually like the 40 degree heat, and am sad to see the heat wave go. at least it's still relatively warm.

so, i'm looking at listings that are proudly boasting central air, or working the a/c in the price and it's just like...i want to open the window in the summer, guys. i don't want your a/c.

it's not even an irrelevance. i explicitly do not want to live in an air conditioned space - and it's not a cost thing, i legitimately find the a/c uncomfortable, and the humidity very nice.

i've pointed out before that i'd really be happiest in a tropical rain forest. and, maybe the reason is because i have relatively near ancestors that lived in one.

i keep pointing out that i don't really know where my paternal grandfather was from, other than that he was dark skinned. but, a sleeper theory is that he may have been south asian because my dad had an unusual blood type.

my dad loved the extreme heat, as well.

i'm getting ahead of myself. i need to see what the pay out is first. and i need to have the money in my hands.

but, if this was just a few thousand dollars less, it would be workable.

and, note that it's also 1100+ square feet - about twice as big as i'd need.

if i can find an 1100+ square foot house for $40,000, can i find a 550+ square foot house for $20,000?

i'll keep an eye on it, but i don't think it's realistic just right now.

https://www.kijiji.ca/v-house-for-sale/windsor-area-on/spacious3-open-plan-bungalow-mobile-home/1368388853?enableSearchNavigationFlag=true

it looks like i'd have to move to thunder bay or sudbury or something, and that's...

i'm not ready, yet.

i want to finish the discography, first - so that when i make that move, i'm just bringing books.

there are empty lots for sale here for around $20,000.

and there are houses to be moved off of the land for around $10,000.

that's less than $40,000.

but, i'd have to find a way to cough up the cash to move it...

you know, i always expected i'd move to a cottage one say, once i got a little older and didn't care about the city life any more. and, that's what is available in this price range: cottages in the middle of nowhere.

i'm not there yet.

here's another crazy idea...

could i buy a house?

well, if i get a big enough payout, is that enough for a down payment?

i don't want a fancy place, i want an area that i can keep the smoke out of. and, one of these little houses i've seen come up for $650/month in rent is absolutely good enough.

it's probably not feasible. i'd have to sign a 50 year mortgage or something. but, what's the cheapest house here that i can find...

in america, you had chattel slavery; in canada, we had the underground railroad.

in america, you conquered and often slaughtered the indians as you moved west; in canada, we signed treaties with them (except in bc), offered them protection from american settlers & tried to make them more british through coercive assimilation policies. mirror reflection...

the general constant is that the basis of canadian civilization has largely been constructed in reaction to american civilization - less in terms of open opposition, but often in terms of learning from mistakes. so, in many ways, canada is america's sober second thought. and, that is the canadiana, the canadianism, the good governance of canadian history - that we pay very close attention to what america does, but we don't copy it the way a colony might, but rather understand the flaws and benefits and try and learn from and improve it via careful empirical analysis...

if we've strayed from this path recently, i can only suggest getting back to it.

of course canada shares a common history with the united states, but it's as reverse images of each other.

so, canada was initially a weakly populated french colony that was conquered by the british by accident. the british were colonizers in the true sense of the word, but the french were mostly interested in trading with the natives. so, the british created high density colonies and then expanded them, while the french scattered small trading communities at a day's travel distance from each other, from the mouth of the saint lawrence to the mouth of the mississippi - new orleans, st. louis, detroit, montreal...

when the british conquered canada in 1763 as a part of an unrelated conflict in europe, it was essentially handed over to the natives. it's not really clear if the british thought they'd seriously hold new france in the long run & the natives spent decades waiting for them to come back. but, for the purposes of our story, we have to point out that, in 1763, canada was almost void of british settlers - it was a french & indian colony, conquered in the french & indian war.

the first major movement of british citizens into canada actually happened between 1776 and 1793, as a consequence of the revolutionary war. so, while america fought a war for independence, canada inherited the loyalists - a shared history, but a mirror reflection.

the second major wave of immigration into canada came during the potato famine. given that the population of canada was very small at the time, this was a major event in our population history. in america, the irish were absorbed; in canada, they really changed the nature of the country. mirror reflections.

likewise, our constitution was written roughly contemporaneously to the american civil war, in the mid 1860s. confederation was 1867. and, we wrote our constitution to reject american governing traditions, because we fingered them as the cause of the civil war, which we didn't want. so, in canada, the division of powers is almost entirely reversed - and that's not an accident, it was done on purpose. the canadian framers believed that the cause of the american civil war was the constitutional protection of states' rights, and they made sure to keep it out of their own document because of it. mirror images.

and, i could continue, but i don't want to get too contentious by defining difference into the 20th century.

canadians don't broadly know the details, but we live the difference, intuitively. it's a true cultural, intergenerational memory in the sense that it's blurry in minutiae, but very real in broad scope.

the democrats seem to want to be the greater evil, all of a sudden, for some reason.

i don't get it.

but, so be it.

i don't know how we ended up in the surreal situation where senate democrats are more hawkish than the republican president, but i am in full support of disarmament (as i always have been), i have no interest in a war with russia and i do not believe that the democrats' shift towards the extreme right on this file is going to do anything besides accelerate their collapse in blue states.

every time i hear a democrat attack russia, i'm reminded of how much of a catastrophe clinton would have been on foreign policy if she had won.

the democrats should have an easy mid-term win in 2018, but they insist on running in favour of an insane conflict that nobody wants.

this can't happen.

especially not here.

it doesn't matter if it affects me or not, in the end.

my reaction is more as a trans-atheist activist than it is as somebody being denied housing.

again: i can't let this slide.

this needs to be cut out at the root.

i can take pictures.

film it.

maybe call the news?

one of these companies is advertising an open house on the weekend.

this is advertised on their website, on kijiji & elsewhere.

so, i sent a question about the open house, and they claimed there was no vacancy & consequently no open house.

i have screen shots of the ads. & i have emails claiming there's no vacancy & no open house.

so, when i show up there on the weekend, i'd better not find an open house.

if i do, i'll be launching litigation on monday.

islam is the new christianity.

i will be strongly proactive and exceedingly aggressive in fighting this.

i am an outspoken & unabashedly leftist indigenous queer person of colour on disability that has been speaking out against islam for years, under the concern that a society that normalizes islam would readily and perhaps even gleefully incinerate my rights, as it drags me out of my home and strings me up a tree.

and, i do believe that this is exactly what's happening with a number of these big rental companies.

i mean, i'm not sure what the precise reasoning is. is it my gender expression? my sexual orientation? the fact that i'm single? the fact that i'm an atheist? the fact that i'm disabled? my skin colour? my indigenous background? my politics? all of the above?

but, i don't have a choice but to prosecute anybody that is carrying out this kind of discrimination.

even if it does not directly harm me, monetarily.

even if the end result is that the company pays a fine rather than restitution.

this is exactly what i've been speaking out against, and i consequently must stand up for my rights.

i didn't want this fight, but i saw it coming, and i'm ready to fight it.

i repeat: liberals are supposed to hate the rentiers, to denounce them as idlers and thieves and insist they charge fair market prices.

today, they're just an accepted part of the bourgeoisie. granted..

...but, they were initially the singular problem identified by liberal economists, and attacked by liberal politicians. to a very large extent, the purpose of liberalism was initially to abolish the rentier class, who at the time were nearly exclusively tory.

that was the entire point of the theories devised by the likes of smith & ricardo: to abolish rentier capitalism.

it clearly hasn't worked so well. but it's useful to put what they intended to do in proper context.

so, there really shouldn't be anybody except tories arguing against going after people that are trying to inflate the rent; liberals are supposed to be virulently opposed to that.

what liberals and leftists are supposed to agree on is that the real public enemy is the rentiers.

property can be freedom, if you can find it, and it sustains - albeit at the expense of the freedom of others.

but, what i'm describing in both scenarios are examples where property is theft.

which is a reminder that property is an impossibility in a truly free society.

and, i do think that there's an issue in this city with chinese landlords refusing to rent to non-chinese people - as there is in pretty much all cities - and perhaps also, increasingly, with muslim landlords refusing to rent to non-muslims, which i would suspect is also pretty normal (even if the chinese dwarf the muslims in terms of populations, here, meaning it's much less visible, as of right now).

the chinese landlords just simply don't return my calls or messages.

these are difficult cases to prosecute on circumstantial evidence.

but, the only way that's going to stop is if people start suing them when they're sure of it.

a second factor that seems to be screwing up the market here is that a lot of the houses near the ambassador bridge seem to have been bought up by asians looking to rent furnished rooms to asian students.

and, they're explicit about it.

"looking for indian student to share room."

it's not like i want to share a room with an indian teenager for $200/month. that's not the point. the point is that the market has been flooded - there is currently a dramatic oversupply of furnished rooms for students. and, this is eating into the normal market.

again: these people will eventually give up. but, for now, a lot of them have 416 numbers, and seem to be operating with toronto mindsets and toronto prices. they're asking for too much money, trying to tap into a market for international students that largely doesn't exist.

the result is that we're going to have a lot of empty, furnished rooms in houses that would have held low income people up until a few months ago - and the city is continuing to broadcast a low income housing shortage.

there should be more strenuous rules around things like offering shared rooms, or converting apartments into rooming houses. or, at the least, they need to crack down on landlords that refuse to rent to non-students.

again: the market will eventually sort this out.

but, i now have 2.5 months.

so, when you see these cops in bc pushing around these indigenous groups for protesting these pipelines, this is legally not a lot different than israeli soldiers pushing around palestinian kids - it's an illegal occupation operating solely by physical force.

so, if the feds want to lay a pipeline from alberta to lake superior, they can use eminent domain (even in indigenous regions), run a bullshit consult process and be done with it, so long as they fight off the court challenge. they can do that because the area was ceded to the crown in the numbered treaties. these numbered treaties are contentious, but they do legally exist.

in british columbia, the land was never ceded to the crown, so eminent domain is illegal (although it does happen). the consultation process is not a rubber stamp, but a nation-to-nation dialogue about sovereign land rights. and, if the natives say "no", then the crown has no further authority - not under legislation, and not under a constitution that really shouldn't even be in force at all.

i'm taking things to extremes that they have yet to be taken to, but eventually must be taken to. and, i do suspect that it will be a resource conflict that eventually leads to constitutional collapse.

what legal basis does an unratified constitution have over an area that is being illegally occupied under international law?

we don't talk about this in canada. but, british columbia is really a special case.

a proper rule of law would immediately acknowledge that the tribes in british columbia should have full sovereignty. not even nisga'a sovereignty. absolute, full sovereignty.

they didn't sign anything. we didn't trick them into signing things, we didn't give them a bad deal - we just showed up and started building.

there is no legal reason why vancouver should be in canada.

it's a crisis waiting to happen.

i think i need a personal update.

i appear to have forgotten to mention that i finished rebuilding february, 2014 on the 10th; i think i thought i'd get through this fairly quickly, and not need to update. i guess i forget that i spent most of march with a broken recording machine. it was a heavy posting month. but it's done now...

how's the smoke? well, it has gotten dramatically better, but i wonder if the heat is a factor. the flip side of that is that the a/c might be off downstairs, which is a sign suggestive of the idea that she has left. that said, i've also been very ired this week for some reason, and my sweat smells alarmingly like marijuana. so, i don't know. it's weird all around, it really is.

i would expect that the posts will start to slow down again soon. i guess we'll have to see....

i'll need to stay in on monday because of the weird message about the electrical. i don't currently have any showings planned until saturday.

the constitution of canada itself, as it relates to british columbia, is actually only applicable on very shaky grounds, to begin with.

i would not expect the idea of a province of british columbia to exist long enough to make it to the next century.

this land does not belong to canada at all.

to put it simply, by what logic does the canadian government claim it has a right to build a pipeline through an area that never ceded it's sovereignty to it except the logic of sheer force overpowering legal and democratic legitimacy?

the only legal claim that canada has to british columbia is the 1763 proclamation.

british columbia is actually, legally speaking, a canadian military occupation of unceded territory.

http://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2014/03/this-particular-group-is-not-signatory.html

but, all jobs are bullshit jobs.

that's the fundamental point.

now you can disagree with me, but i keep telling you i'm a fucking anarchist....

well, let's forget about the silly religious nonsense for a second and ask a functional question: why do we dispose of dead bodies in such a wasteful fashion?

the reason is that we realized, apparently at some point very early on, that dead bodies can make us sick. we didn't come up with useful ways to understand this until the last century, but we realized that something about these dead bodies was causing us harm. so, we buried them, or we burned them.

even the zoroastrians, who insisted on feeding dead human bodies to wild animals, had the good sense to remove them from human contact by placing them on placards in the sky. a persian city in antiquity would have these fifty foot platforms with dead bodies on them, to be fed to eagles and vultures. gruesome, but arguably more holistic than cremation or burial.

now that we do understand this, why don't we adjust to it? because we also understand something else - all of that organic material is just going to waste inside of a metal coffin.

again: i'm not a utilitarian, but i think we need to be more rational about how we recycle human remains, and so there's something kind of inspiring about this.

http://www.critical-theory.com/jeremy-benthams-preserved-corpse-haunt-nightmares/

if the situation were reversed, and somebody asked me to smoke away from the window, i wouldn't just get up and move, i'd check in to see if i was far enough away. i would register that concern and respect the request not to smoke in their window.

because that's just what canadians do in that kind of situation.

that's the cultural expectation in this country.

it follows that the entire concept of "smokers' rights", while quite american, is really deeply uncanadian.

the canadian cultural norm is that smokers should be expected to move when told they're causing discomfort. because, that's just what we do, here, in canada.

speaking of differences between american and canadian culture, what i'm dealing with with these smokers is a good example of it, and i've pointed this out before.

i have a neighbour who is smoking near my window, and it is bothering me. there is no reason she needs to smoke near my window other than that she wants to. i have asked her to smoke elsewhere repeatedly, and done various things to chase her off, but she doesn't care: she's going to smoke where she wants.

i simply don't understand this. i don't understand why somebody would reject the requests of their neighbours like this, and the reason i don't understand this is that i was raised in a more canadian manner - while this person may very well have been born in the united states.

a typical canadian response to a situation like this is to understand that smoking beside the window is causing your neighbour discomfort and to get up and move. canadians are generally concerned primarily with politeness, and rational means of conflict resolution. we place a high importance on the concept of compromise and are often willing to bend over backwards to keep the peace.

a typical american response is to make up a right to smoke on their property (in fact, canadian jurisprudence does not recognize anything like a right to smoke in your yard, nor does it have any constitutional protections for property, but does uphold ideas like nuisance, trespass and enjoyment insofar as it recognizes the damage caused by second-hand smoke) and tell their "annoying neighbour" that they can do what they want and to fuck off. and, american jurisprudence may actually be sympathetic to this viewpoint, in ways that the canadian jurisprudence simply isn't.

what's going on in my backyard here is really more than a conflict over smoking, and that's why it's proving so difficult to resolve. this is a cultural conflict. as a canadian, i expect this woman to be a good neighbour and smoke away from my window and can't comprehend why she won't relent. but, as an american, this woman is obsessed with her imaginary property rights, and unable to understand how i have any say in the question of where she's smoking.

if i were to move back to ottawa...

i just spent an hour comparing, and the market might even be better in ottawa, right now. certainly, the advantage of relocation appears to no longer be apparent.

i have a long time before i need to take that idea seriously, and it relies on the premise that i get a large payout. but, how would i do it? is it feasible?

i guess i would sell as much furniture as i can and just ship back my electronics & books & clothes. that would avoid the need to hire actual movers; i could probably hire a taxi-van to get my stuff out in two or three trips.

i asked my aunt about this years ago, as she moved from ottawa to fernie, bc, and she said you can buy space in a train and have it shipped. i couldn't imagine another way to do it, short of convincing my mom to  take a road trip. and, if it's just gear and books, and a bicycle, how much could that cost? a few hundred dollars?

so, if i get a $4000 payout, and the market here doesn't open up...

i'd then hitch back to ottawa. or, maybe take a bus, if i feel like splurging. could i hitch with the train and be a real hobo for a few days?

i guess the next step would be finding a place in ottawa to store the gear. this entire scheme is going to rely very heavily on my grandmother. can i use her storage bin? can i sleep in her spare room?

so, i have an algorithm. let's see if the inputs pan out.

i just saw an ad for something that is very enticing in an area of ottawa that i like quite a bit. windsor, you're losing me, here...

i got a letter that the landlord is "doing electrical work" on monday.

i'm mildly concerned, yes. but, i know my rights.

this is just a friendly reminder that landlord interference with hydro or water in ontario is a felony that is potentially punishable by imprisonment.

Common offences under the Act

The following offences are reported most often:

For landlords:

• disconnecting or interfering with a vital service that the landlord is required to supply to tenants (e.g. heat, electricity, fuel, gas or water)
• failing to provide rent receipts to tenants who request them
• illegally evicting a tenant without following the eviction process
• failing to make a tenant’s belongings available within 72 hours of eviction
• collecting unlawful security deposits
• altering the locking system for a rental unit or residential complex without giving the tenant replacement keys
• providing false or misleading information in documents filed with the Landlord and Tenant Board.

http://www.mah.gov.on.ca/page142.aspx

i don't have time. i'm trying to plan a delicate move.

but, if necessary, i will send people to jail for their stupidity, and not think twice about it.

it was july 29th, 2013 that i signed a lease for my basement apartment, starting on august 1, 2013, after having reached an agreement, in principle, on the 26th.

i don't expect the situation to be much different: if i find something, it will be on the 25th or the 26th or the 27th.

....or even the 28th.

or the 29th.

let's hope it's not the 30th.

that's how this city works.

i've actually never bought anybody dinner before.

i've been on something like five dinner dates in my life, and it's actually very important to me that the bill is....it's less that i want to split it, and more that i want separate bills.

because, why the fuck would i buy you dinner?

buy your own fucking dinner...

i would have hoped that we would have raised our girls and women to look a weinstein in the eye and say "no, i don't want to.", get up and walk out - and then press charges for soliciting prostitution.

in a situation where a weinstein-type offers advancement in exchange for sexual favours, and an actress agrees, then the correct legal description of the situation is that the weinstein-type is soliciting prostitution from the actress, and the actress is consenting to the proposition.

so, we need to ask ourselves if this is permitted behaviour or not.

and, while i don't exactly like it, i'm not sure it should be illegal.